December 09, 2015

New Images Show The Closest View Ever Of Pluto's Incredible Surface

NASA's history-making
flyby of Pluto this year with its New Horizons spacecraft keeps coming up
with the goods, and these latest images sent back from the probe give us our
closest look yet at the icy dwarf planet.

The images
on this page and collected in this video are the
sharpest views of Pluto ever seen (by human
eyes), and could be the closest we get to Pluto for decades. Even though New
Horizons performed its flyby of Pluto several months ago, the probe captured an
awful lot of data on that unique sight-seeing trip, and it's still transmitting
the highlight reel back to HQ.

"These
close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the
power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to
scientists back here on planet Earth," said
John Grunsfeld from NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "New Horizons
thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as
the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory
back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see."

These
images, taken during New Horizons' approach to Pluto, show approximately 77–85
metres (250–280 feet) of the dwarf planet's surface per pixel, revealing
features less than half the size of a city block for the first time.

Taken
together, the reel of images records a strip 80 kilometres (50 miles) in
length, extending from Pluto's horizon, down across the al-Idrisi mountains,
over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across the icy plains that cover much of
Pluto. The shots were taken by New Horizons' telescopic Long Range
Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) about 15 minutes before the craft's closest
approach, at a range of about 17,000 kilometres (10,000 miles).

We've
assembled a few of the key snaps here, but if you really want to explore Pluto
in all its icy glory, there's
also a composite vertical panorama, which you can freely zoom in on and pan
up and down to your heart's content.

"These
new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto's
geology," said
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. "Nothing of this
quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys;
yet at Pluto we're there already – down among the craters, mountains and ice
fields – less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these
images is simply unbelievable."